An Untold Tale: Steven DeKnight Discusses Smallville’s Justice League Spinoff

Recently on Twitter, writer-producer Steven DeKnight (Marvel’s Daredevil, Spartacus) made a reference to a Justice League spinoff from Smallville that almost happened a decade ago. The series would have been led by Justin Hartley as Green Arrow/Oliver Queen — five years before Stephen Amell took on the hood — and characters including Bart Allen, Cyborg, and Aquaman, all from the Smallville episode “Justice” which DeKnight wrote and directed, were to be a part of it.

“Justice” was one of the highest-rated episodes of Smallville and was also one of the highest-rated TV episodes in The CW’s ten-year history.

Nine years ago, in doing interviews for the Smallville: The Official Companion book for Season 6, this writer spoke with DeKnight about the “Justice” episode, and while the book itself has a lot of quotes related to what we saw on the screen, a lot of the talk about the Justice League spinoff was excised. As those quotes were not published, we are sharing them here for the first time.

“There were a couple of different plans that never quite came to fruition,” DeKnight revealed during the interview for the book. “At one point we were planning a spin-off; we were starting to put it together.”

“It was going to be basically Green Arrow, Cyborg, Flash, a couple of other DC characters living in Metropolis,” DeKnight recalled. “The idea was that Oliver Queen was basically giving refuge to young people with superpowers, kind of in a Professor X kind of way, putting together this team and also trying to help out these people, like he says in ‘Justice’ about how he helped out Victor Stone and Bart and Arthur Curry.”

The Justice League spinoff would have been teed up in Smallville’s Season 6 finale. “The idea with that was that Green Arrow was going to appear towards the end and help Clark with his final battle, provide him with an important piece of information. As it was in the season, we actually find out that Green Arrow and his crew of superheroes have been attacking the 33.1 installations. In ‘Prototype’ they provide the information on how to penetrate the prototype’s forcefield. But originally he was going to come back and help out, and that was going to springboard the spin-off that, ultimately, just never happened,” he said.

Sadly, it was not meant to be. “I was supposed to co-create it and run it, so I’m doubly sad. We were all really excited about it, you know, me and the other actors. We all got along great. We really wanted to make this show, and we thought it would be really, really cool,” DeKnight lamented.

What might we have seen in a Justice League spinoff? We don’t know, but one plan might have included Brainiac — even possibly in a different form, played by a different actor if James Marsters had been busy. “We had talked about bringing Brainiac back, quite possibly in a different form, played by a different actor. We’d kicked around some ideas for bringing him back as somebody else from the Buffyverse, which would’ve been a fun nod. We talked about bringing him back as a woman. And I wouldn’t be surprised at some point between now and the time the show wraps up that Brainiac pops back up,” he said, predicting something that ultimately did not happen. DeKnight revealed that he did have a master plan for Brainiac in the spinoff. “I had a master plan for Brainiac showing up in the spin-off that I won’t tell you what it is, because you never know, a spin-off may happen in the future, and I will use this. But it was awesome,” he said.

Smallville: The Official Companion Season 6 is still available on Amazon.com – order a copy and show the publisher there’s still demand, because this writer would still enjoy finishing the series someday, and there are more stories like this one within! And if you’d like more Smallville Untold Tales, please let us know!